America’s best cities for beer drinkers to live & play

Everyone likes to believe that their hometown is one of the best cities for beer drinkers. Unfortunately most of us are apparently wrong. I thought Chicago knew a thing or two about beer, but it turns out we don’t even crack the top 25.

In order to determine the best cities for beer drinkers, we looked at data on 300 of the largest U.S. cities. We gathered data on each city for the following five metrics:

Total number of microbreweries and brewpubs.

Number of microbreweries and brewpubs per 100,000 residents.

Average Yelp score of breweries. Data comes from Yelp.

Number of bars per 100,000 residents.

Average price for a pint of domestic draught beer.

We ranked each city across each metric, giving the total number of micobreweries and brewpubs a double weighting, the number of microbreweries and brewpubs per 100,000 residents and bars per 100,000 residents a single weighting and half weightings to the average Yelp score and average price of a pint. We then averaged those rankings. The city with the best ranking was given a score of 100. The city with the worst ranking was given a score of 0.

Obviously the results skew against big cities, so take them with a bucket of salt. Plus, a neighborhood in Chicago was just named one of the top binge drinking cities in the country, so there’s always that.

Colin Joliat is the brains behind this rinky-dink operation. He covers the alcohol industry with two parts information, one part comedy, and one part WTF is wrong with this guy. He's written for Brobible, Guyism, Thrillist, CoolMaterial, Craft, and more.

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